“She had never met this other man, or heard his voice, and she had tried not to love him.”

This exquisite story by Irish author Mary Costello explores the loss of faith in marriage and the temptation to stray. On holiday in Co. Clare, a woman spends time with her husband while plagued by thoughts of another man.

Known only as E, the man lives in New York yet recently visited Dublin. While attending an author reading, he found a novel with the woman’s email address inside the back cover. A prolonged correspondence begins between E and A: “He sent her quotations, lines from songs; he sent her poems. Did he not know the effect such words, such lines, such poems might have on a woman?”

Described as “an affair of the mind”, their correspondence feels somehow more shameful than a sexual liaison, testing the woman’s religion as well as her marriage. I fell in love with this story from the first reading and always enjoy returning to it. Costello plumbs the depths of romantic relationships, the virtues of commitment and the meaning of happiness. The story is also very funny, its humour delivered with an elegant touch.

Recalling Elizabeth Taylor’s tragicomic classic ‘The Letter Writers’ (which I recommended in A Personal Anthology’s collaborative summer special), ‘The Astral Plane’ weaves together embodied scenes with epistolary fragments. Both stories dramatise the space between life and writing, highlighting the joys and the limits of literature.

First published in The China Factory by Stinging Fly Press, 2012. Collected in The China Factory, Canongate, 2015